Shelf Life

Mathew Cerletty paints ordinary things — a Diet Coke logo, a bottle of ZzzQuil, a fish, a planet — with a flatness and precision that makes recognition itself feel slightly off, and this is the first book to take the full measure of that method.

Published by Karma in an edition of 1,000 to coincide with the artist's Shelf Life exhibition at the gallery's East 2nd Street space in spring 2018, the 232-page volume gathers roughly 160 color reproductions of paintings and drawings together with the artist's working notes. Nicole Rudick's essay traces the development: representational painting encouraged and abstraction discouraged at Boston University, early portraits of friends and of models found in magazines, and then the encounter with Lisa Yuskavage, John Currin and Richard Phillips that gave him permission to bring color, patterning and a deliberate ridiculousness into the work.

Cerletty was born in 1980 and lives and works in New York. Karma has continued to publish him since, including True Believer in 2023 with a text by Catherine Lacey.